2026-10-14

Perry Mehrling RIP

Perry Mehrling is no more and I teared up a little today morning when I learnt of his passing. His series of lectures on Money and Banking were a huge influence on me several years ago. I use his quote "Liquidity kills you quick" all the time with unsuspecting folks who sometimes don't realise how profound that statement really is.

Superstar podcasts are Silicon Valley’s way of talking to itself

Superstar podcasts are Silicon Valley’s way of talking to itself

All share an in-crowd mystique bordering on incestuousness. In April OpenAI reportedly spent $100m-200m to buy then-18-month-old TBPN (though there was no mention of the affiliation during Mr Altman’s interview). The “All-In” hosts are self-described “besties” with many of their billionaire interviewees. In San Francisco Mr Patel has shared digs with Anthropic’s researchers. They are fascinated by AI, which they talk about with passionate intensity and expertise. They are also an echo chamber, with a tin ear at times to the concerns of the rest of America.

But the rise of social media and the growing power and wealth of big tech generated a rift between Silicon Valley and news outlets. Mr Battelle says that parts of the tech establishment started to view traditional media as “anti-American” for questioning the “dominance of the tech hierarchy”. For their part, old media, whose business model has been hurt by the tech giants, sometimes smell of sour grapes. Podcasters, who share their guests’ techno-optimism, provide a friendlier platform.

Instead, AI is at the centre of their discussions. Unlike many parts of America, they treat it as almost the only topic worth discussing. But this obsession has further pushed Silicon Valley into a “monoculture”, says David Senra, an influential podcaster. Recently he has been to tech dinners where conversation veers only between AI optimism and doomerism. “It sounds like they are all reading the same tweets,” he says.

If all else fails, they can podcast from Mars. But will people still want to listen to them?

Learning as a social activity

Want to be a lifelong learner? Don’t go it alone | Psyche Ideas

The internet is full of resources for self-directed learning: for any subject, you can easily find blog posts about essential texts, links to university syllabi, and hours of YouTube lectures. When I attempted to make use of these guides, however, I often found myself disengaged and unfocused. I chastised myself for scrolling through social media while watching online lectures, or forgetting most of the ideas inside the books I read.

The problem, however, wasn’t my attention span. It was my approach: I was struggling because I saw learning as a solitary pursuit.

My interest in self-directed learning eventually led me to the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, one of the most influential educational theorists of the 20th century. In his impassioned manifesto Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), he criticised the idea that ‘the teacher teaches and the students are taught … the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.’ True learning, Freire believed, could be accomplished only ‘through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’

…But stories like these helped me realise that a formal education is, for many, only the beginning of one’s intellectual and creative life. I began, slowly but surely, to piece together what my own intellectual life looked like: taking online classes with writers and literary scholars; joining in-person book clubs to deepen my understanding of challenging texts; and finding friends who offered generous, useful feedback on my work.

Relationships like these might be the most important resource for learning something new. You can teach yourself almost anything, it turns out, within a community of encouraging and intellectually ambitious peers.

The Woman Who Wants You to Ditch Your Phone

The Woman Who Wants You to Ditch Your Phone

At the park, Lamm wore a thrifted black top with a paper clip in place of a missing button. She appears somewhat out of time, her face cleansed of TikTok makeup trends and her silhouette freed from the long jorts that have seemingly drop-shipped onto everyone in her age bracket. Unled by Google, unfed by DoorDash, unmatched on Hinge, she navigates a version of New York where seemingly everyone else is locked in a tragic embrace with a personal device. When she walks outside, she is now the rare human who is alert and open for engagement.

Theory-free AI

In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.

The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

2026-10-17

Hotspan

Forget Healthspan. Midlife Men Face Pressure to Extend ‘Hotspan’

Americans have become obsessed with longevity, extending not just our lifespan but also our “healthspan” — how long we live healthfully and happily. As a result, what middle age looks like has shifted too, thanks to everything from skincare to surgery. If we feel young and healthy on the inside, why wouldn’t we want to look that way on the outside? Now we’re all about extending our “hotspan.”

This perspective shift is more substantial for aging men, upon whom pop culture and society have traditionally set lower expectations of health and appearance. (This was explained most brilliantly, and unprintably, in an unforgettable Inside Amy Schumer sketch from 2015.) Millions now tune into “manosphere” podcasts extolling the importance — nay, necessity — of keeping up one’s vitality. And it’s about time: Women, of course, have felt pressure to stay hot forever since … forever.